Hello, is there a Pied Piper out there?

JAKARTA (JP): He's a bit of a hyperbolist this Dutch friend of mine, so when he started telling me this tale I thought 'Well, here we go, another shaggy dog story from Johan'. I wasn't far wrong but it was a 'shaggy rat' story or rather a story about a rat he thought was almost the size of a dog.

I let him talk...it's best that way, especially when he's in his cups...and soon realized that he might have a point. He was talking about a rat he had seen here in Jakarta, a rodent 'the size of a small dog'.

His florid face was pulsing with the telling of this, and while I was allowing for a little exaggeration here and there I conceded that there are rats of a quite extraordinary size in the city. Too many of them!

And look at them for heaven's sake. Complacent? I'd say so. Comfortable? They are so damn complacent and comfortable that they wear top hats and doff them to you as they waddle by; 'Good evening, all.'

And have you ever seen a Jakarta cat in a close encounter with a rat? Fat chance. They've worked out a system of co-existence that would astonish the warring factions of the Middle East, and deliver sermons to the death-grapplers of Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.

Friend Johan's temple was quopping, a blue vein throbbing as he went on. The rat he'd seen was half the length of the cafe table and probably big enough to pull a coach.

As we shuddered mutually at the thought of this gargantuan rodent, a thought occurred to me and not for the first time. Why does the city government not put a bounty on the rat population of Jakarta? Rp 500 for each tail, say.

There are armies of mischievous little boys and unemployed youth out there who would gladly bring in tails by the score if the Jakarta city government would only put up a bounty. And they would have a social purpose far more broadly beneficial than those self-appointed youth traffic cops that mill the wind at U- turns and intimidate motorists.

Rats do not count as wildlife, except in the most banal sense. They are not likely to invoke the sentimentality of animal rights activists or prompt poets to compose couplets such as 'A robin redbreast in a cage/Sets all of heaven in a rage' (Blake).

They are, after all, immemorially associated with the C14 Black Death, the plague that swept out of Central Asia along the caravan trails to the Middle East and killed a third of the population of Europe.

Plague-ridden bodies figured in an early example of biological warfare, catapulted over the walls of Black Sea ports by Mongol raiders to infect visiting Venetian and Genoese traders, who duly carried the contagion back with them across the Mediterranean.

Even as recently as 1997 the World Health Organization was reporting an outbreak of rat-borne plague in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. The whole impoverished former Soviet region was vulnerable to the disease, and with civil war raging in Tajikistan and Afghanistan -- who would have relied on the Taleban to take preventative measures? -- we could easily have seen a major outbreak across a much wider area.

Perhaps it is because the Black Death never penetrated the Malay archipelago -- it is true there was an outbreak here in the early part of this century and again in 1945-1949 as a direct result of the Dutch blockade but not on the scale of the Black Death -- that officialdom here has such an insouciant attitude to the presence of rats.

There is no folk memory among the people of these islands of whole districts being laid waste, of hard-earned granaries being destroyed by 'rattus rattus', that furry dark skulker in corners, drains and ceilings.

In Britain, for example, the Plague is still recalled in the children's rhyme, 'A ring, a ring of roses/ A pocket full of posies/ Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down'.

Whatever the case, wouldn't it be nice to see a war on this pest get under way. And let the boys -- and girls, if they wish -- of this city take some money home into the bargain. Perhaps a civic award for champion ratcatcher would be best of all. Out there in the slum districts of Manggarai or Tanjung Priok there must surely be one enterprising young person who would be happy to be crowned 'Pied Piper of Jakarta'.

I, for one, would rejoice at his or her coronation. And so too would Johan.

-- David Jardine